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Tuesday, 30 September 2014

They don't assault - unless prevented by the police - only the English Defence League (EDL) now. The extreme Leftists have been attacking even the moderate UKIP, showing that nothing short of Leninism satisfies them.

Two days ago, UKIP leader Nigel Farage was in Rochester, Kent, with the new candidate for UKIP in the upcoming by-election in the constituency of Rochester and Strood, Mark Reckless - who defected from the Conservatives to Farage's party on the last day of UKIP's conference - for a day of campaigning in the constituency.

Reckless will resign his Rochester seat as a Tory MP and fight the by-election as UKIP candidate rather than imposing his choice of party on constituents.

Breitbart London reports that UKIP members gathered outside Rochester Castle and made their way to a local pub called The Crown.

“There was an organised protest by the Conservative Party,” Mr Farage said, “including Craig Mackinlay who lives in Rochester and who was beaten to the Conservative nomination by Mark Reckless.”

“Part of the extreme left who have been busy on social media after they were notified that I was in Rochester today decided to turn up.”

“Because of that I had to be removed quickly from the situation,” Mr Farage said, adding, “Kent Police were excellent”. He explained that the situation would not be taken any further.

There has been an anti-Farage group set up in South Thanet where the UKIP leader has been selected as the UKIP candidate.

At its core are members of the Socialist Worker Party and other left wing extremists who were involved in violent scenes earlier in the year which resulted in a magistrate finding Andrew Scott guilty of common assault.

Mr Farage and his security team have made it clear that they will continue to hold public events despite the threats of violence.

One of the Leftist protesters ran into the front of the pub and tried to attack Mr Farage but was halted by his security team:

Socialism is dying, so it’s no wonder the foot soldiers are starting to appear on the streets, now. Everything will be done to prevent its demise, including much worse than what we see now.

It is notable that as is the case with EDL and Britain First demonstrations, it is always the left that start the fighting. Are these people so insane they can't control their anger when anyone disagrees with their fascistic world view ... or are they just a bunch of rent-a-mob thugs who are trying to suppress free speech.

This is not the first time. In January, Farage was attacked by Stalin's heirs in Kent, and even physically assaulted with a placard:

The "Nasty Little Nigel" protest was organised by Bunny La Roche who recently resigned from a full time rent-a-mob job with the Socialist Workers Party where it appears she was thoroughly detested by her comrades to form a militant group called Kent International Socialists. Comrade La Roche is the Kent branch of the fascist UAF and has links to other extreme left wing groups. Her Facebook profile lists her "inspirational people" including the mass murderers Lenin, Trotsky and Marx. She attracted criticism even from her own comrades when she shouted "when are you going to die" at a 75 year old BNP councillor.

Comrade La Roche was helped in organising yesterday's violent protest by communist Green Party councillor Ian Driver, perhaps inspired by his party's MP, Caroline Lucas, who was arrested for her involvement with a violent protest against a fracking company last year by left wing extremists. The violent protest also attracted support from the fascist UAF, SWP and Labour activists.

Nigel was left shaken but unhurt after being hit on the head with a placard - an attack that could have had serious consequences as he is still recovering from an operation on his back for injuries sustained from his plane crash in 2010.

Monday, 29 September 2014

Saturday 27th September I attended a meeting of the London Forum, which organises conferences with various international authors and thinkers of the New Right or - in the words of one of Saturday's speakers, Mark Weber - the "anti-Establishment" movement. The latter is actually my favourite name, as it does away with the anachronistic distinction between Left and Right. Our opponents he calls the "Establishment".

Four speeches were delivered.

The first was by Mark Weber, historian, lecturer, current affairs analyst, writer, and director of the Institute for Historical Review. Born and raised in Portland, Oregon, he was educated in the US and Europe. The IHR has been attacked as a "hate group" and a "Holocaust denial" organisation, but we know that this kind of accusations mean nothing in our politically correct world.

I want to find out for myself. The organisation's website explains:

In fact, the IHR steadfastly opposes bigotry of all kinds. We are proud of the support we have earned from people of the most diverse political views, and racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds.

The IHR does not “deny” the Holocaust. Indeed, the IHR as such has no “position” on any specific event or chapter of history, except to promote greater awareness and understanding, and to encourage more objective investigation...

One prominent American journalist and author who has looked into the critical claims made about the IHR is John Sack, who is Jewish. He reported on a three-day IHR conference in an article published in the Feb. 2001 issue of Esquire magazine. He rejected as unfounded the often-repeated lie that the IHR and its supporters are "haters" or bigots. He described those who spoke at and attended the IHR conference as "affable, open-minded, intelligent [and] intellectual."

The London Forum says that Weber "has appeared countless times as a guest on US and overseas television and radio. He has produced many podcasts, and his many writings have appeared in newspapers, periodicals and websites around the world, and in a range of languages."

Weber's speech was "The End of the American Century: The Accelerating Crisis of the West, and Prospects for the Future". He talked about the impending extinction of Europeans as an ethnic group in both Europe and North America, and the end of the hegemony imposed at the end of the Second World War.

He introduced a 2010 book available only in German: Deutschland schafft sich ab ("Germany Is Eliminating Itself"), by Thilo Sarrazin, a German Social Democratic Party politician, former member of the Executive Board of the Deutsche Bundesbank and former senator of finance for the State of Berlin.

In short, the book's author is as much Establishment as you can get. The book itself is described by Wikipedia as

the most popular book on politics by a German-language author in a decade, [and in it] he denounces the failure of Germany's post-war immigration policy, sparking a nation-wide controversy about the costs and benefits of the idea of multiculturalism.

Pretty good for a social democrat.

The second speaker was Bain Dewitt, described as "a rising star" and the young blogger of The Identity Forum . His speech, "The God of the Whites", was an examination of religion as an expression of racial unity. Bain attempted to see if religion can be the spiritual dimension of nationalist and traditionalist movements.

He was followed by another American writer, Greg Johnson, editor of the website Counter-Currents Publishing. His was a particularly interesting speech for me, partly because I'm Italian and partly for its philosophical nature: "Giambattista Vico and Modern Anti-Liberalism".

Vico is a 17th-18th century philosopher from Naples. Most Italians know of him and his theory of the "corsi e ricorsi storici", or the cyclical nature of history. But he's little known in the Anglo-Saxon world, despite having had some influence, especially on James Joyce's books. Vico's Scienza nuova ("New Science") is the basis for Finnegans Wake.

The idea of history going through the same stages over and over again is very far from the contemporary view of history as progress. Vico, according to Johnson, was exceptional, in that he was the first anti-Enlightenment thinker and the only one of his time, despite being himself an Enlightenment thinker in some ways.

Vico postulated a fundamental law of historical development, that follows the same pattern by evolving through three phases: the age of gods, "during which gentile [meaning "pagan"] men believed that they were living under divine rule"; the age of heroes, when aristocratic republics were established; and the age of men, or what we may call "democracy", "when all were recognised as equal in human nature". Here Vico is a son of his "Enlightened" times, when he talks of the necessity to respect "natural reason" and of "the human rights dictated by human reason when fully explored".

At that point man’s increased powers of reasoning result in a state of anarchy, when everybody considers himself his own ruler and only looks after his own pleasure and short-term interest. Sounds familiar? It must do, because it's a fairly accurate description of what we are going through now, a description which will become even more faithful as decades, nay years, nay months go by.

Then men get tired of that anarchy and “turn again to the primitive simplicity of the early world of peoples”, and to religion. Thus the cycle starts again.

The beauty of it all, said Johnson, is that Vico's view of history enables us to stop trying to mend the present state of affairs, which is beyond repair, and instead look forward to - even accelerate - its end, which will usher a new era.

Or I would put it as "the darkest hour is just before the dawn".

Johnson concluded his speech by saying that, whereas Giorgio Almirante, the leader of the Right-wing Italian party Movemento Sociale Italiano, said, "Julius Evola is our Marcuse, only better", we can say that Vico is our Karl Marx, only better.

Finally, barrister and contributor to Heritage & Destiny magazine Adrian Davies concluded the conference with his speech "Two World Wars and One World Cup: Myths and Realities of the Anglo-German Relationship in the Twentieth Century".

In this year, which marks the hundredth anniversary of what historians have called the first "Western civil war" and the seventy-fifth anniversary of the second, Davies narrated German history until 1914, arguing that the Great War not not caused uniquely by Germany, as the myth goes, but also that Germany was not a perpetual victim either.

It's early days yet. I consider my newly-found London Forum very stimulating. I'd like to see more of it, and in particular what the role of Christianity is in the various ideas represented.

Sunday, 28 September 2014

Today I drove past a small demonstration in front of the University College London in Gower Street.

I didn't know what it was about, but I saw socialist posters.

The pavement, where no more than a few dozens people were standing, was littered all over with paper.

I was reminded of what Liberty GB leader Paul Weston told me at the English Defence League demonstration of a week ago. He noticed how all the litter from the food and drinks of the 400-500 attendees had been neatly piled up in a corner, in contrast to what happens at events organised by the Left.

In Gower Street I saw a confirmation of that.

It doesn't surprise me. In fact, this behaviour is very much in accordance with the spirit of Leftists. What moves them is fundamentally destructive.

History has repeatedly shown that whenever socialists and communists have imposed their rule and made societies in their own image, what resulted was destruction, chaos, starvation and mass murder.

Only people motivated by destructive impulses can not be repelled by the ideology that led to it.

Friday, 26 September 2014

Look at the UK parties: Liberal Democrats are sometimes (for example during New Labour) more Left-wing than the traditionally socialist Labour, which in Blair's times was more Right-leaning than it used to be historically, and which some people (critics? cynics?) used to say was more Right-wing in its policies than the Conservatives.

Part of the confusion stems from the fact that the Left, whose very nature was to be anti-Establishment, is now The Establishment, having been effectively in power throughout the West since the end of the the Second World War, whether or not they are in government: they have the ideological power and influence, effectively controlling media, universities, cinema, and other powerful means to influence public opinion through the so-called “popular culture”.

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There will be no more Stormings of the Winter Palace, no more revolutions, in the modern world or, at least, in that part of the world that has indeed become modern.

There will be no need for that, because whoever controls the media will be in power. And I could add: not only the old media, but also the new ones, although they tend to be freer and less exposed to censorship.

There are two basic ways to look at reality: scientific and non-scientific.

The scientific approach, or frame of mind, says: I’ll follow the investigation of reality wherever it takes me, even if I don’t like the results of this investigation; I’ll accept them nonetheless.

The non-scientific approach , or frame of mind, says: I have certain ideas, or convictions, which are dear to me (for whatever reason), and to me they are more important than the investigation of reality and its results; therefore, I will deny those results if they don’t fit in with my convictions.

Non-scientific people are, in politics, utopians, and in all fields are those who believe in superstitions, New Age types of theories, things like astrology, tarot reading, spiritualism and so on.

One thing needs to be added here. People allow themselves to believe all sorts of irrationalities (I don’t think that there exists any idea, however absurd, that has no believer), but only when these irrational notions do not touch something which has a direct connection with that person’s interests. There are exceptions, as usual, but this is the general rule.

Examples: people who say that they don’t believe in science still make use of all science’s applications like technology; people who say that they believe in out-of-body experiences take the car to go from point A to point B, they don’t use those out-of-body powers; people who believe in telepathy use the phone, rather than relying on their ESP powers: I could go on, but you got the idea.

In politics, we can see the non-scientific approach at work constantly. The Left and utopians in general are particularly prone to have it.

It is the way of thinking more typical of a child than an adult (magic and similar), and yet many adults have not really overgrown it.

The reason why those two processes should be kept well separate is obvious: if we let our desires, or our mental image of what reality should be, have an effect and interfere while we are still in the process of understanding what is, the resulting understanding of reality will be compromised, and cannot serve its purpose of guiding us in action later on, when we need it.

An example of this is the current attitude of the Left towards the questions of race and IQ. Many leftists wish to deny that there are genetic differences in IQ among human races, despite the overwhelming evidence in support of this; in fact, many leftists even try to deny the concept of race altogether.

And the funny thing about this is that these are the people who generally believe in the evolution theory and Neo-Darwinism, so they are in clear contradiction with themselves.

You can’t have it both ways: either there is a great scheme of things behind nature (a teleology), or there is none, and living beings are products of random processes. If you believe in the latter, you must accept that this randomness, this nature is not politically correct and may have produced human beings not in accordance with your pet theories.

I have even heard defences of that theory of genetic equality among races (that, in itself, is a contradiction in terms) that ran like: “Why should blacks have an average lower IQ than whites?”, bringing back teleology and grand design in the scientific discourse when it serves their purposes. There is no why.

Other people who should know better say: there is no connection between intelligence and skin colour.

There is no conceptual connection, but we are not talking about conceptual connection here. We are talking about genetic connection.

For example, taller humans have on average higher IQs than short humans. It is another case when, conceptually, one sees no association.

But the way genes act is by having chracteristics determined by the same gene (allele) which have no conceptual, or even functional, correlation with each other.

Thursday, 25 September 2014

Technology in the West has enormously advanced, but the human mind, although flexible, is not adaptable to the point of making the rapid changes that may be the consequence or the accompaniment of this technology.

Aeroplanes can now cover distances to the other side of the earth, the opposite hemisphere and remote latitudes in a minuscule fraction of the time it was taking even one or two centuries ago.

But the people transported by the aircraft through huge geographical ranges don't go even near covering the same distance so rapidly and easily in cultural terms.

We have found ways to move people physically far and fast, but not means to make them change and adapt from one religious, cultural, ideological and social milieu to another at comparable speed.

When a man moves from an Asian or African country to Britain he doesn't magically become a different person.

This has resulted in the strange phenomenon, probably to such large extent peculiar to our age, of people in the same street belonging not only to different parts of the world but to different ages in the history of the world. They are living next door to each other, but at the same time they are not only geographically but also historically light years away from one another.

Mass migration from the Third World to the West has produced the paradox that what was portrayed as a humanitarian gesture – the welcoming of destitute people from poor nations to wealthier countries - has had the effect of spreading some of the globe's worst atrocities far beyond their place of origin.

Wednesday, 24 September 2014

The umpteenth case of child sex abuse in Britain perpetrated by Muslims, the Rotherham abuse, has understandably left the self-proclaimed “progressives” and multiculturalists in disarray. The Leftist media outlets are on the defensive but still trying to maintain their ground.

Their best weapons are to distract public attention by diverting it to whatever has not been committed by Muslims, and the use of double standards, of which the most shocking example is the differential treatment of Muslims versus the Catholic Church.

The same people, assorted Leftists and secularists, who immediately jumped to the conclusion that all Catholic clergymen are either directly involved in paedophile abuse or in its cover-up are now bending over backwards to deny any connection between the Muslim grooming and sex-slavery gangs and Islam.

An article in The Guardian by Slovenian Marxist psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek, included by Foreign Policy in its 2012 list of Top 100 Global Thinkers (no less), seems to condemn but in fact displays this behaviour. Deceitfully entitled “Rotherham child sex abuse: it is our duty to ask difficult questions”, it covers just about everything but Rotherham – and generally Muslim - child sex abuse.

The word “Muslim” appears twice, “Islam” once, “Islamophobic” once, “Catholic” three times (the same number as “priests” and “racism”), plus assorted “Christian” and “Christianity”.

It doesn’t talk about Islam at all, except to briefly mention women’s second place within it, but immediately preventing the reader from dwelling on the subject too much: “Without blaming Islam as such (which is in itself no more misogynistic than Christianity)…”.

The most ironic part of the piece is where Žižek blames his comrades for doing the same he does:

The left exhibited the worst of political correctness, mostly via generalisations: perpetrators were vaguely designated as “Asians”, claims were made that it was not about ethnicity and religion but about the domination of men over women, plus who are we – with our church paedophilia and Jimmy Savile – to adopt a high moral ground against a victimised minority.

The double standard in this kind of coverage and comment is so gigantic that it’s better described as a total reversal of the truth.

We have on one hand Muslim paedophile and sex-slave gangs who act in total accordance with Islam on many levels. To begin with, Muhammad, the model man for all Muslims worthy of the name, gave the good example by marrying a 6-year-old, Aisha, and consummating their marriage when she was 9. He also owned sex slaves. Both sex with underage, even pre-menstruating, girls and sex slavery – both relevant to the Rotherham case - are permissible in Islamic Scriptures and law. Even today, child marriage is commonly practised in the Muslim world.

In fact, in Pakistan – the country of origin of most of the UK child groomers or their families –,

according to UNICEF, child marriages accounted for 32 per cent of all marriages in the country from 1987 to 2005…

Around 100 million girls are expected to enter into child marriage in the next decade. [Emphasis added]

Pakistan has or has had the world record for paedophilia-related internet searches, such as "child sex video". Child molestation in Punjab, a region of Pakistan where 97.21% of the population is Muslim, has reached alarming levels, and “68 percent [of] girls and 32 percent [of] boys have been the victims of paedophilia.”

Add to all this the contempt which Muslims have for white women, considered as “easy meat” due to the way they dress and their drinking habits, and you can easily see that the disproportionate representation of Muslims among those convicted for child rape, grooming of girls for sex, and child prostitution in the UK – 91%, while Muslims are 4-5% of the total population – is not coincidental.

The arguments for linking the epidemic of paedophile rings in Britain with its Muslim immigrant population are strong, solidly founded and well-reasoned. The bias and distortion of the facts are on the part of those who deny them, contrary to all evidence.

We then have on the other hand an extensive media treatment, that lasted for a very long time, of the Catholic Church as a hotbed of paedophilia, vigorously connecting it to its preaching, including chastity, whereas in fact the overwhelming majority of sex offenders have wives or girlfriends.

In reality, research on the subject shows exactly the opposite. These are the main findings in the USA: Catholic priests who ever abused minors are less than 2%, the same figure for Protestant clergy is 2-3%, and most of the abusers are not clergy or staff, but Church volunteers; the figure for rabbis within organised Judaism is 2-3%.

The most reasonable conclusion is that the Catholic Church, far from being especially connected to paedophilia – which it condemns -, has itself partly succumbed to the ethos of our age, although greatly less than other institutions dealing with children.

While the Left was caught unaware, the British political Right and its warnings about the dangers of Islam have been vindicated by the Rotherham outrage. The UK public, in the middle, may be – ever so slightly – waking up to the reality of the “religion of peace”.

Perhaps yes, as a true Guardian reader, and liberal leftie, I suppose I didn’t want to raise that too hard…

[I] should have done more to investigate child abuse…

maybe “liberal leftie”, “Guardian reader” and “multiculturalist” should finally become dirty words, insults of the same grade as “fascist”?

Saturday 20th September the English Defence League (EDL) held a demonstration in Downing Street in front of the Prime Minister’s residence over this scandal, which I attended.

I had never been to an EDL demo before. Yes, they are working class, heavily tattooed, and - with their flag waving, slogan chanting and raucous singing - closely resembling beer-drinking football fans in appearance and behaviour. But they are decent folks doing their bit in a legal and peaceful way for their own country and all ours, for the survival of Western civilisation. Their courage and commitment are unfortunately not widely matched in the general population.

The EDL's bad reputation in the public perception is largely due to the kind of media reporting we are well used to. In the same way as Christians being slaughtered all over the Islamic world is for the media equally-balanced "sectarian violence", and Israel's reaction to Hamas rockets is "indiscriminate bombing of civilians", so the throwing of stones and bottles at EDL crowds by the Leftist thugs of UAF (Unite Against Fascism, an offshoot of the Socialist Workers Party) becomes for the BBC and mainstream press "clashes between the UAF and the English Defence League".

Just witness this ABC News report in which the “hate next door” in the title incongruously doesn’t refer to radical Islam, but to the EDL that tries to protect us from it.

The leader of my party Liberty GB, Paul Weston, looking at some litter from the food and drinks consumed by the 400-500 people attending the demonstration, tidily kept in a corner, pointed out to me how you never see that at events organised by the “liberals”, where garbage is left all over the place.

Liberty GB is considering fielding as a candidate in Rotherham at the 2015 British Parliament elections a former Muslim who converted to Christianity.

Paul Weston gave a brilliant, passionate speech in front of the Prime Minister’s residence, culminating in “Cameron, you're a liar and you're a traitor!”

From the pen (a cage would have been better) in which the police wisely kept them, the only contribution to the subject of the Rotherham child-grooming gangs coming from the “counterdemonstration” of the UAF was "Nazi scum!", which is more or less their only "argument" against the critics of Islam.

Tuesday, 23 September 2014

The atheism that is currently prevailing in Western Europe has not been a naturally occurring development in the mind of large numbers of people.

It's not, as individuals like Richard Dawkins and the 19th-century French positivist sociologist Auguste Comte would have you believe, an effect of the progress of science. In fact, scientific progress points exactly in the opposite direction. The more we know about the universe, life and consciousness, the more we realise that the calculus of probabilities shows that all these extremely complex natural intricacies and perfectly accurate mechanisms have no chance of having happened by chance.

No, present common atheism is the result of a multidecadal, aggressive, strenuous and embattled campaign by various Leftist and subversive forces and movements, such as cultural Marxism, to destroy Christianity, which they correctly see as their enemy and obstacle in their effort to destroy the West. In fact, the two - Christianity and Western civilisation - are in many ways and senses synonymous, which is why the enemies of one, from Islam to communism, are invariably the enemies of the other.

Then, useful idiots à la Dawkins come along and continue the Leftist subversives' fight for the destruction of Christianity without really knowing what they are doing.

It’s disputed that Lenin actually used the expression “useful idiots” in his works, but whether he did or not is irrelevant. He certainly understood the concept very well and what he did use, if not the words, were the naïve people in Western countries who believed that communism (and its corollary, atheism) were a force for good and helped him in his propaganda.

And Islam can thank all of them, who have made its task of penetration into and domination of the West infinitely easier.

How interconnected and interdependent socio-communism, atheism and media propaganda and brainwashing are can be seen, for example, from the fact that the BBC employs more atheists and non-believers than Christians.

A 2011 internal BBC survey found that just 22.5 per cent of all staff professed to be Christians, while atheists and those of no faith were 23.5 per cent.

The relative numbers of the two groups in the BBC are greatly disproportionate compared to the UK's general population.

BBC veteran Roger Bolton, who presented BBC Radio 4’s religious current affairs programme Sunday, said to The Daily Mail:

There is an inbuilt but unconscious bias against religion, fuelled by the fact staff are not representative of the public. It is not a conspiracy but it needs a correction.

This was the first time that the religious beliefs of BBC staff had been disclosed.

Viewers have also claimed the BBC portrays Christians in soap operas or dramas as ‘weak’ or ‘bigoted’.

That's how subtle propaganda works.

BBC's former political editor Andrew Marr spoke in 2007 of the BBC's “innate liberal bias”, and described the Corporation as “a publicly funded urban organisation with an abnormally large proportion of younger people, of people in ethnic minorities and almost certainly of gay people compared with the population at large”.

In October 2008, the conductor of the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra spoke of an ‘ignorant’ secular liberal minority in the media seeking to drive religion from the public sphere.

In January 2009, the Christian BBC presenter Jeremy Vine told Reform Magazine that it has become “almost socially unacceptable to say you believe in God” on the BBC. He did not think he would be allowed to say that Christ is who he said he was on air.

In July 2006, a veteran BBC executive told a meeting called to address the problem of anti-Christian bias: ‘There was widespread acknowledgement that we may have gone too far in the direction of political correctness. Unfortunately, much of it is so deeply embedded in the BBC’s culture, that it is very hard to change it.’

Stephen Green, National Director of the organisation Christian Voice, commented:

The real problem is not the lack of Christian programming, but the fact that no world-view other than a tedious atheist outlook informs normal programming content. The BBC really should have the decency to acknowledge there are valid points of view other than the grindingly politically-correct anti-Christ atheism held by the majority of its staff.

And we all know - from the way it keeps the public unaware of the dangers of Islam, multiculturalism and mass immigration - how powerful media indoctrination is.

Friday, 19 September 2014

Before the referendum on Scottish independence and in order to keep the United Kingdom from disintegrating, the leaders of the three main British parties - David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband - made generous promises in return for the Scottish people to vote No to breaking away from the Union.

They promised more powers and money for Scotland. Some say that these promises have come dangerously close to Maximum devolution (Devo Max for short), which means that, except in defence and foreign affairs, the Scottish Parliament gets power over everything.

A source of concern is that these promises - which looked like a sign of desperation when in the last few days of the campaign the Yes camp seemed to stand a good chance of winning - were made without a clear mandate from the electorate and without consulting the English, who may resent being just exploited for their money.

In particular, the Westminster politicians pledged to maintain the notorious Barnett formula, which for over 30 years has been used to allocate British taxpayers’ cash between England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland and has been widely blamed for the large public spending gap that exists between England and the three devolved territories.

Even Lord Barnett, the former minister who devised it, called the formula a “terrible mistake” and a “national embarrassment”.

In 2012-13, public spending per head in each of the home nations was:

•£10,876 in Northern Ireland
•£10,152 in Scotland
•£9,709 in Wales
•£8,529 in England

So, public expenditure in Scotland per head is 20% higher than in England, although English MPs have no real say in the governance of Scotland.

The TaxPayers’ Alliance (TPA) has called for the abolition of the Barnett Formula entirely. It asserts:

In an era of devolved government, such spending gaps have become increasingly difficult to justify. Should higher public spending in some home nations be subsidised from taxpayers elsewhere? Why shouldn’t those areas pay for their own promises through higher local taxes?

The Barnett Formula cannot possibly survive. Little more than a crude back-of-the-envelope rule for splitting annual increases in public spending, back in 1978 it was a short-term expedient. It was never designed to last for thirty years and to bear the public scrutiny and resentment it now engenders.

Jonathan Isaby, Chief Executive of the TPA, added:

English taxpayers want an end to subsidising Scotland and the Scottish Government wants financial control devolved to Holyrood...

Furthermore, as even more power is set to be handed to the Scottish Parliament, the time has come to end the anomaly of Scottish MPs voting on policy for other parts of the UK where Westminster MPs have no such say North of the border. English votes for English laws is the only fair way to proceed.

A revolt has progressively grown inside the Conservative Party against David Cameron’s promises to Scotland, as Tory MPs with English constituencies are not prepared to make their constituents foot the bill.

Rail Minister Claire Perry criticised the “whole raft of goodies on offer for Scotland that will be paid for by us south of the border to appease the Yes voters”. She wrote in her local paper, the Wiltshire Gazette and Herald:

If there is a proposal to allow devolution of local taxation, as well as maintaining the current level of funding as a dollop from the UK Parliament, then that can hardly be equitable for those of us in the Devizes constituency and all other area areas in the non-Scottish union.

Tory backbenchers have demanded an English Parliament. They say that their constituents find the differential treatment between English and Scottish subjects of the Queen unjust and claim that they will not vote in support of the Devo Max.

Michael Fabricant, a former Tory vice-chairman, said before the referendum: “Even if Scotland votes No, serious questions will be asked about the complacent mishandling of the vote by No10 and the incompetence by Miliband.”

Paradoxically, it is English nationalism that may be fuelled by all this.

The English are not amused. Their mood is reflected in this comment to a Spectator blog post:

Why does Westminster think it has a mandate to offer Devomax? Whatever Scotland gets, we want for England too.

Subtitle: the umpteenth confirmation that governments shouldn't be entrusted with our money.

This was reported last July, but I've only learned about it now.

It's got to be covered, it's too absurd to miss.

On 10 July 2014, the Daily Mail reported the planned axing of a wind turbine built with taxpayers' money - almost £50,000 - and generating only an average of £5 of electricity a month.

It was calculated that it would have required 757 years before its cost was offset.

I'm tempted to say that this must be the most absurd wind turbine ever but, given the huge cost ineffectiveness of these contraptions, I'm not so sure.

This one is a 60ft turbine in Wales, built at the Aberystwyth offices of the Labour-controlled Welsh government in 2009 "with the aim of reducing its carbon footprint".

In November 2013,

[T]he Welsh government said the turbine was part of its ‘ambitious’ green programme which also featured a biomass heating system and solar panels at its Aberystwyth offices.

‘As a result, we have seen a 17 per cent reduction in CO2 emissions over the past two years and are well on course to meet the overarching target of a 30 per cent reduction by 2020.’

Yes, you can expect that from Labour. Another sign of idiocy was its erection in a sheltered valley, away from the windy coast.

The company which supplied it, Quiet Revolution, said it had warned the Welsh government in advance that there was no wind in the area of the site, but the civil servants paid no attention. I don't think that reality mattered to them as much as making an ideolgical statement. And the money wasn't theirs, anyway.

Well, at least this monster of inefficiency is now going to be removed, I hear you say. The Welsh government has seen the light. No. The turbine is to be scrapped only because it broke down in January and then the manufacturer went into liquidation.

Otherwise, it would have stood for another few centuries, provided it survived the catastrophes caused by global warming, of course.

Incidentally, British people pay for wind turbines like this twice: first, as taxpayers, to construct them, and second, as utility customers and given their inefficiency, to subsidise them through higher electricity and gas bills.

The Aberystwyth turbine is not an isolated case:

Earlier this year Rushcliffe Borough Council in Nottingham was criticised after it emerged it spent £30,000 on two turbines which generated only £95 of electricity in 12 months.

Wednesday, 17 September 2014

It isn't just the whole education establishment from kindergarten to PhD studies, the mainstrean media industry in its entirety, Hollywood, and the various scientists, journalists and assorted others who, acting as pseudophilosophers, write books on how God doesn't exist. These are only the big players in the campaign to persuade the general public that atheism and anti-Christianity are the way forward, the "right side of history".

Then there are those minor or intermediate opinion-makers, a group of whom comprises writers from the second, third or fourth rank down, myriads of them. Like, for example, the author of a book I read during my just-finished holidays. I wanted fiction, something escapist to get a bit away from reality and I borrowed from a local library Find Me a Villain by Margaret Yorke.

As the title suggests, it's a crime novel. It's a genre I love. But this story was mediocre, and its author didn't shine as brilliant or clever, with original ideas.

Possibly she just wanted to appear intelligent (I'm guessing here), and these day, she thought, that means Godless.

For whatever reason, anyway, her main characters - due to no requirement of plot or character construction, but purely arbitrarily, or maybe just to represent them as women of their (our) times - make a handful of inconsequential comments to the effect that God doesn't exist and, even if he did, he would have given up on us a long time ago. Which is just as well since, as one of them says, it would be creepy to have someone watching you all the time.

Perhaps Yorke had read atheist authors, or maybe she imitated another, more famous, writer of whodunits like herself, Ruth Rendell, who has created a world - or maybe has just tried to reflect the one she sees and frequents - with plenty of Muslims (her settings are mostly in London) but hardly ever a Christian in sight. Maybe because her native English characters are "not religious people".

True, she simply represents today's reality of her city, but I don't want to be reminded of our Islamisation when I engage in the game of discovering the culprit of a fictional murder, especially by someone totally unaware and uncritical of our progressive enslavement.

Novelists like Rendell, Yorke and numerous others influence the way their readers view issues, possibly in a subtle manner. They contribute to the general attitude that takes for granted mass immigration, Muslim invasion and the disappearance of Christianity.

They hammer another, inconspicuous nail in the coffin of Jesus and His message.

A further example of people who influence and form public opinion in a secondary and probably indirect way are "celebrities". And, since we are talking about atheism, the rock world has had (and still has) a huge and deleterious impact, particularly on the young.

The role of rock music in the development of the Leftist ethos has not been sufficiently explored.

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About Me

Philosophy graduate, journalist, website creator and
blogger born in Italy and living in London. I have been London correspondent for Italian media, including Panorama, L'Espresso, La
Repubblica. I translated Peter Singer's book Animal Liberation into Italian.